How I Published A Novel
So Late In Life

by Lou Sondern

People have asked me why I waited so late in life to publish my first novel as I have had numerous shorter works published. It seemed to me a novel would be too much work; it would require too much focus to fit in with my other activities, such as raising six kids, being a corporate wife and running a big house.   But in 1993 we downsized and the rest of my life expanded before me, like a bunch of happy balloons loosely held. No hurry to do anything, I’d have endless time to myself.

Then my balloons started popping. I had signed up for a writer’s week in the Ozarks at the home of my friend Charlotte. I started out to her house on a sunny afternoon on an easy four lane highway. Then the road divided. My eyelids drooped but I stiffened myself to stay awake.  Suddenly I felt the car jounce and woke up to find myself going 70 miles per hour down into a wide drainage ditch with waist high grasses.

I continued across it, a distance of about half a city block, up the other side of the divided highway, and continued on--driving the wrong way.  It was all the same to me. Cars came over the crown of the hill; after a few seconds of stunned silence drivers took in the prospect of a crazy woman in a red car charging toward them. When they honked to warn me, I turned back into the swale, through the grasses, and up the other side, where I continued on my way at 70 miles per hour.

By this time, I saw the added danger  of the sheer rock walls where the highway was cut thru the hills .Usually after having such an experience, I would stop, pull over, and shake until my heart beat slowed.  But I felt no excitement, no heart thumping, as I flew along the road.  My adrenaline system had failed me, but my brain coached “Stop at the next town, have coffee and think this over”.

I did and waited until I calmed down. Later I arrived safely at my destination.  When I told Charlotte what had happened, she widened her eyes and said, “You’re still practically comatose. You could have killed yourself or someone else”. Than she said firmly, “I suggest you go to your room and write your obituary.”  My obituary? What had that to do with anything?  Still numb, I complied.

When I handed her what I had written, she scanned it and said, “Fascinating.  You were the oldest of eight kids.  And you helped your grandma to kill chickens for Sunday dinner. You say your job as a child was to gut the hen, to pull her entrails out of her cavity. It broke your heart to see all the eggs she contained, all the embryos that would never be completed..  Her egg for that day was large, formed, but never would be laid because she died.  Sad.”  She turned her attention to the paper again. “But what does this have to do with your OBITUARY?  Is there anything that isn’t here, anything still in your oeuvre you really want to do?”

For a few minutes I looked at her, my mind jumbled.  I’d been whipping back and forth between divided interests all my life. As a writer I’d published articles, short stories and poems, and had three plays produced.   Several times I’d done historical research and started writing a novel.

“I need to publish a novel,” I said. “That’s what I want to be remembered for.  It won’t be easy, but I have to do it.”

How to begin? I implored the Holy Spirit to inspire me. Eventually she answered, “I’ll be glad to inspire you, but I can’t type for you; I have no hands.”  I took that as a yes, she’d be my Muse, and I identified her with IxChel the Maya Moon goddess, one of the characters in my romantic quest novel.

I admitted to myself and to others that I needed help. I found a typist and started on an impossible plot. I tortured myself with feelings of inadequacy, until I learned to trust my Muse.

I didn’t know what to do next; I had spent years sending out manuscripts for plays and other writings that were returned to me.  This all takes time, and time I didn’t have. Then I discovered at a class that editors could be hired, a revelation to me.  There is a long list of them on the internet.

When I held the first copy of my novel, The Moon Child’s Promise, in my hands, shortly before my 79th birthday, I felt a quiet cut-cut- kadockett thrill. I’d done it; I had produced my egg.

Now I am working on my memoirs.